Social Media

Jay Reatard – It Ain’t Gonna Save Me

This week’s customary music video is a bit of a tribute to excellent Jay Reatard who passed away last week. And what better way to pay our respects than the slow-mo shindig antics of It Aint Gonna Save Me?

We’ve already seen astounding interactive music videos, and live Spike Jonze-directed pieces performed and filmed at the YouTube Music Awards, so really a feature-length film is the last of the unchartered territory in Arcade Fire’s commingling of music and visuals.

It’s been a long old wait, but three months after dropping the trailer, Bjork has finally released her Andrew Thomas Huang-directed short film for Black Lake in full on her YouTube channel. The ten minute film was commissioned by MOMA as part of her retrospective which opened this spring, and focuses on the pain of heartbreak, in accordance with the much of new album Vulnicura, which was written following her split with Matthew Barney. Created in collaboration with the 3D design firm Autodesk, the film is an ethereal but powerfully theatrical offering, and sees Björk walking barefoot through Icelandic caves, ravines and moss fields.

Last year one of the music industry’s most notoriously shy singers became the subject of a documentary which followed him across America on tour. That artist is Bill Callahan, and the girl who made this happen is Hanly Banks.

Adam Carpenter is quite rightly Instagram-famous for his daily 15-second dance videos, which have now been turned into three minutes and 23 seconds of dancing for Low Cut Connie’s new music video Shake It Little Tina. The video sees Adam jiggle his way through old people’s homes, hospital appointments, interactions with law enforcers and pool-side antics. As much as we all like to perpetuate the impression of high-brow humour, there are few things more entertaining than pretending to fart fireworks whilst dressed up like Uncle Sam at a sports day.

I can imagine that pitching for music videos can be a really interesting process: “Well, we’re going to dress her up in an outfit made of dog treats and hot dog sausages, and have her run around in an underground carpark with two massive Alsatians.”

Whenever we need a power-surge in the studio we have a straight-forward recipe for success: Azealia Banks and headphones. Seriously, if you need to be ridiculously productive and do loads of high-quality work in an unfathomably short amount of time (just like Azealia Banks does), just stick on Broke with Expensive Taste and go, go, go.